Understanding Trauma

Trauma: the Soul Centred Approach

The word ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek term for ‘wound’.   This wound occurs when events overwhelm an individual’s mind body system with feelings that are too much to cope with.

In working with trauma, Soul Centred Psychotherapy draws upon the latest in neuropsychological research to enable a comprehensive treatment of the effects of either single incident (eg. car accident, assault, violent death of a loved one) or chronic trauma situations (eg. childhood abuse, domestic violence).    Events like this create a psychological wound or injury, and this means that people struggle to cope or perform their everyday tasks normally.  This definition may sound quite simple, but the disturbance to an individual’s functioning can be very complex, and painfully debilitating.

As a Soul Centred Psychotherapist, I have been trained to work with trauma, PTSD and complex PTSD in several different ways.  However, in line with recent understandings of what creates trauma, first and foremost, clients can have the experience that they are accompanied in their pain… that they are no longer alone with their terrible experience.   Recent theories about trauma propose that trauma occurs when we are alone, without an attuned Other, when the horrible things happen.  Through the relationship built as part of a Soul Centred approach, clients  (sometimes for the first time ever!), are able to tell their stories while experiencing the powerful effects of being profoundly seen and heard by another person.

However, the Soul Centred engagement with trauma also incorporates the understanding that merely talking about what happened is often not enough to fully process traumatic events. This is where simple counselling can fall short.  The repeated revisiting and describing of what happened may make the feelings seemingly go away, but flashbacks, body symptoms and dreams may remain.  When this happens, deeper processing is required.  Emerging techniques, such as EMDR, are part of the toolkit utilised by Soul Centred Psychotherapy for this deep work, along with other energy centred and creative methods which to help clients to integrate traumatic events.